Let other people define success and you’ll win their game and still feel like you lost.

Borrowed goals are hard to spot because they arrive with applause, which feels a great deal like satisfaction until you get there and notice nothing landed. You can meet every marker somebody else set and still find the reward went to them, since the definition was theirs from the start. The flatness afterwards is not ingratitude. It is accurate feedback about whose life you were living.

Write down what a good year would look like if nobody ever heard about it. Compare that with what you are currently working toward, and adjust one thing this month.